Prosecutors said they had managed to trace the stolen money — nearly 120,000 bitcoins — through an intricate web of transactions done to hide its origins, to a number of crypto wallets controlled by Ilya Lichtenstein and his wife, Heather Morgan.
The U.S. Department of Justice announced Tuesday that it had executed its largest financial seizure in history, recovering $3.6 billion in bitcoin BTCUSD, -1.82% stolen in a 2016 hack of the currency exchange Bitfinex.
The pair were arrested Tuesday morning in Manhattan and were scheduled to appear in court later in the day on charges of conspiracy to commit money laundering and to defraud the U.S. government, authorities said. They have not been charged with perpetrating the hack itself. Not all of the bitcoin stolen in the 2016 hack has been recovered, and the investigation is ongoing, prosecutors said. When the hack occurred, the bitcoin was worth approximately $71 million. Today, it would be worth $4.5 billion, they said.
Alpha Bay was shut down by authorities in 2017 for harboring illicit activity, but prosecutors said key evidence was recovered that allowed them to follow the trail of the stolen money from the Bitfinex hack.
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